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Podcast #12

Rhiannon was kind enough to give her take on the importance of lead-generation using marketing automation, how to improve audience engagement and how events such as UC Expo play a critical role in helping steer marketing & communication strategies for those companies attending by providing face-to-face engagement with prospective customers and industry specialists.

Edward Loades: We’re here today at UC Expo at the XCeL in London. And we’re speaking to Rhiannon Williams, who is the Senior Marketing Manager for Channel at Gamma. We’re going to ask just a few questions about various pain points within their company, and some hopefully insightful marketing agenda for you today. And so just like to first ask, could you just introduce yourself and a little bit about your role and what you’re doing it here at the at the event today?

Rhiannon Williams: Sure, as I point out, my name is Rhiannon, and I’m a Senior Marketing Manager for Channel and we are exhibiting here today, meeting with the number of customers and Channel partners and those attending the show.

Edward Loades: Right. Let’s just dive in with some with some questions. So I just wanted to ask you, how do you communicate the complexity of integrating your technology into companies from a marketing perspective?

Rhiannon Williams: So for us, it’s about bringing out the actual business benefits of what the technology can do – it so very well talking about, you know, unified communications and, cloud and hosted fighting systems, but what that actually means for a customer and why they would need to buy it. And that’s to say, what we take to our channel partners as well, in terms of how they market is really breaking it down those business benefits that you’ll be bringing with this technology, talking about product, you’re going to lose an audience very quickly. It’s about the benefits that you’re bringing, and the tangible benefits that you bring to that audience.

Edward Loades: Absolutely. And marketing is moving extremely quickly at the moment, you know, should we be using more technology in our campaigns, you know, what is the messaging should be stronger, etc? Human marketing, etc? What kind of emphasis do you put on technology, such as marketing automation, etc.?

Rhiannon Williams: A huge emphasis, and we’re constantly looking at, you know, there’s so many providers in the space now for marketing platforms. So it’s a big part of what we do for lead-gen. And we yeah, as we said, continually engaging with different providers to do that.

What we do ourselves, you know, we’ve got huge base of channel partners, we’ve recognised that for a lot of partners, marketing is seen as a bit of a luxury that they’re not, you know, it’s not quite priority, they don’t have the money to invest it. So what we’ve done for our partners to provide their own marketing portal through our system, called Accelerate, and they can run their own marketing automation and social media and email campaigns through that, we see that as a really, really key way that partners need to start engaging with customers to not only acquire new business, but engage with their current customers.

Edward Loades: So you’re essentially managing a plethora of marketing campaigns for your customers as well?

Rhiannon Williams:Yeah, we provide white label material for partners to put their own logo on and their own details on and try and provide it as easy as possible to the partner to start their own marketing it’s that you know, some sub-partners, the one or two people in a company, marketing’s not high on the priority list. But in terms of growing it, it’s essential that they engage in that type of activity.

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